Last week I attended Dan Berninger’s Voice Communication Exchange Committee. It was an interesting event with people gathered from carriers, associations, vendors and regulators. The event sparked a good discussion and Dan brought up some interesting points.
His definition of an All IP Telco is as follows:
- IP enabled devices as end points
- IP from user to service provider (OTT or IPS)
- IP service interworking between service providers
- Connectivity and service agnostic architecture
To Dan’s credit he has gathered people to discuss the issue of turning off the PSTN for a few years now and his story keeps evolving. However, one theme is very accurate which is that the value in the network is more in software than in hardware. When you look at the revenues involved in computing and communications they are both trillion dollar industries. However, when you look at their evaluations the computing side of the shop has a 4x valuation over their communication shop.
And yet communications is becoming more and more of computing environment. So how does telecom unleash itself from the shackles of perception and join the computing world in its rapport with Wall Street and the public at large? This is where it gets tricky. Like the blind monks with the elephant we all have a tendency to see a section of the problem from our own unique perspective.
For the incumbents the first goal is to not repeat the role of the past. When enabling communication to the world, the need for the smaller guys to interconnect gave the big carriers the roll of Interconnection at the tandems. To eliminate the roll of those tandems the 2000 or so smaller carriers in the U.S. have to be weaned off the tandem and move to a self-managed model. This is very doable, except there are regulatory rules that must change and the carrier has to make new relationships.
For the HD voice folks the promise of all IP interconnection is to have direct end-to-end media control and not the current experience of transcoding and PSTN compatibility losing much of their value in experience the moment they leave their network. Here the wholesalers have seen an opportunity, however, the commitment is not universal and the quality cannot be guaranteed without specification. Interestingly in this case Apple’s (News 
- Alert) Siri and Google speech recognition may be giving us insight as to how to solve that problem.
For me the big issue is the migration to wireless. By 2018 the odds are likely that the carriers are going to be a very mixed use environment and the wireless network is going to migrate the fiber core to a mixed Ethernet environment. The server farms connected to the carriers for many of us will be the central office of record and not the building associated with the old home of our phone number. This is where Richard Shockey (News - Alert) has been pointing to the numbering rules and the opportunity to manage the relationship of carrier to customer based identity and not the access point. We are all connecting to the network in a variety of ways these days.
At the end of the day, the VCXC has an interesting task of herding the cats and getting the blind monks to get on the same page. The value of getting on the same page is not only to get the proper valuation of the companies, but to join the innovation happening on the network.
It will require vision and comprise from the blind monks, and as a blind monk I am open to the discussion.
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Edited by Stefanie Mosca
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